Warmer weather, dead plants and another day without feather pulling

The weather has warmed up and for the second day running I haven’t seen any feather pulling or found any feathers in the run hurrah! I can’t believe after all my stressing about this and trying everything I could think of, that with a change in the weather the girls have just stopped this behaviour in an instant. I really do hope this is it now and this awful stage is over.

With a change in the weather our thoughts also turn to the garden and our thyme lawn seems to have died. With the amount of fun the girls got from the dead shrub we gave them recently we have decided never to throw away dead plants again but to give them to the girls.

The dead thyme lawn

A very sad looking lawn

A green thyme lawn

The thyme lawn last summer

The lawn should be green then a lovely mass of purple when in flower. It’s been struggling a bit round the edges  for the last few years but I have never seen it look like this before. As thyme likes good drainage I dug in sand and gravel before planting it five years ago. I think what has happened is, that because we had such a wet summer followed by a wet start to winter, I just hadn’t noticed how dry it had become recently. I think the ground has dried out and most of the thyme has died.

We decided to buy some new plants to mix in with the thyme plus we will take some from our existing flower beds. We have an abundance of primroses that have self seeded everywhere so can be transplanted into the lawn.

The girls will get all the dead thyme that we take out, but this is a project for this weekend.

Some new plants

I have dotted out some new plants to try out but they do look rather lost at the moment. This may be an ongoing project for a while.

I am so relieved that the feather plucking appears to have stopped and really hope this has passed now. It’s just such a shame that Dotty has a bare neck and head but hopefully she will be back to normal eventually.